Ask Kalena

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Hi Kalena,

I receive your Newsletter updates and I always enjoy them.  I’m working on a medical website and the client was wondering what to do if someone puts up an inflammatory website about a specific doctor? Can we report a threatening and/or inflammatory website to Google? I’ve never run into this problem before.  Any ideas?

Thanks, Mitch.

Dear Mitch

One of the best (and worst) things about the internet is the fact that just about anyone can publish just about anything.  This offers a great opportunity to disseminate information, however, this can certainly be a problem if  the information is inaccurate or defamatory.

In your case, if the information is actually true (even if it is unflattering – or even nasty), there is probably not very much you can do.

If the published information is untrue, your first course of action should be to contact the site owner and ask them to modify or remove the information.  If they refuse or are unresponsive, you may need to seek legal action to “encourage” them to make changes.

Once the site has been updated, and recrawled by search spiders (which may take some time), the updated content should start appearing in search result listings.  Google has a long memory and sometimes old (deleted) content seems to persist in search results for a very long time.  It is possible for the site owner to request (via webmaster tools) for content to be removed from the Google Index – but once again you would need the site owners co-operation to do this.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, recently published a post about getting pages removed from Google, but as a general rule Google will not remove defamatory content unless it has a court order to do so (although this policy may vary depending on the country concerned).

The official Google documentation page on how to remove a page from Google’s search results provides more information.

Good Luck..

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing

You have a great website, nicely optimized, easy to navigate and you have conducted a good solid general link building campaign. Your page rank has increased and you are happy with the flow of visitors to your site. What is next? How can you maintain your online reputation and continue to build good quality incoming links over time? You might want to consider editorial link building via an Article Marketing campaign.

The first thing you need for a quality Article Marketing campaign is a selection of well-written, keyword-rich articles related to your niche industry. Depending on your time and budget constraints, either hire a freelance writer or have them written in-house. Each article will be published with a resource box at the bottom acknowledging the author and a link back to your web site.

Articles are more likely to be published if they are informative rather than promotional. For example, if you are the webmaster of a ‘tour guide’ travel site, a selection of well-written travel articles covering topics such as: travel experiences, vaccination suggestions, tourist attractions, architectural and religious history, do’s and don’ts for safe travel etc, will establish your company as an authority in your market niche and create consumer confidence in your service.

Imagine a potential customer daydreaming at work about a future trip to Italy. He hasn’t decided on the particulars of his journey yet. He enters the search query “Tourist Attractions in Italy” and your article appears in the search results. He reads the article which describes the history and various tourist attractions of an ancient Roman city in Italy. The article is informative, well written and by the time he finishes reading, he has decided he would like to go there. He clicks on your company’s link in the resource box and lands on your travel site. Not only has he landed on your site as a potential customer, he has arrived with a positive expectation, as “first contact” has already been made via your article.

Effective distribution is very important for the success of any article marketing campaign. Compiling a distribution list of niche article directories is time well spent on your campaign. For an extensive list of article directories visit: SearchEngineWiki Article Directories. Depending on whether you intend to distribute your article to dozens or hundreds of article directories, you may wish to consider using article submission software. Article submission software does not fully automate the process, but it can take the sting out of it. If you use submission software it is important to personally monitor that your article is submitted to relevant directories and published within relevant categories. In the case of hundreds of submissions, a good quality submission program can ensure the process takes a day or two, not a week or two. I can recommend Article Submitter by Submit Suite for this purpose.

As an ongoing strategy, article marketing can produce tremendous results for your company. Remember, article circulation and referencing within the web is potentially eternal. A good article can live forever and provide hundreds of back links to your site over time. If you are interested in learning more about how to effectively harness the potential of article marketing for your company, take our Article Marketing and Distribution course here at Search Engine College.